I feel about weddings the way cats feel about log flumes; the way babies feel about bathwater; the way cows feel about bolt guns and sloping floors. It’s not horror or dislike, political discomfort or cynical detachment. It’s fear. Pure, unbridled, fear.

I’m far from alone in my fear of weddings. To quote Richard Pryor, a man who enjoyed weddings so much he got married seven times to five different women: “Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings ... and lawyers.” That’s precisely it. Weddings bring together the heinously unlikely bedfellows of sex and state; of vows and discos; of poetry and that boy from your primary school who once set fire to your hair and now appears to be the best man.

Weddings are a compilation of all the things most likely to bring a 29-year-old woman out in hives: commitment, contracts, estranged family and emotions. God knows how brides don’t simply slide down the aisle on a collective stream of sweat, tears and Rescue Remedy.

And weddings are everywhere, of course, particularly in August. According to the Office for National Statistics, the greatest number of marriages take place between men and women aged 25 to 29 (welcome to my in-tray), while there was a 5.3% increase in marriages in 2012, bringing the number to 262,240. That is a lot of bouquet missiles and broken shoe straps.

My fear of weddings has a particular tang. It tastes of champagne and sugared almonds, of fruit cake and forgotten speeches, of toasts and dry-mouthed small talk. It is the fear of formality, the phobia of emotional vulnerability and, inevitably for the single guest, the anxiety of social exclusion. According to an article by Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, “Anything that defines the self as useless, incompetent or inadequate may bring anxiety, for it raises the possibility that the group might reject one as incompetent.”

Boy, oh boy, do weddings make me feel incompetent. Not simply because I’m about as far from settling down to a life of matrimonial contentment as I am to playing in the FA Cup final, but because weddings involve a cacophony of the sort of unspoken social conventions that can truss you up like a pheasant. What to wear, how much to spend on a present, how honestly to describe your affiliation to the groom, who to invite as a plus one, how to react when you don’t get a plus one, what to write in the guest book, whether to book a room or catch the last train home, whether you get invited to the ceremony, how to react when you don’t get invited to the ceremony, whether to heckle the speeches, whether to heckle the vows, how athletically to dance to Common People at the reception, precisely when to sneak out on to the terrace to throw up in a plant pot. It’s a minefield.

That’s before you even begin to consider the sort of outfits, polite eating and staged photos that guarantee I end up with a bleeding foot, skirt tucked into my knickers, mint in my teeth and a fixed smile last seen on a taxidermied pike.

I don’t know what other people talk to strangers about at weddings. As the daughter of two fantastically and frequently divorced parents, there always comes a point in the night when I start asking guests how they’ve stayed married. You should not do this. But I can’t help myself. Like the ancient mariner, I list around the hall, stoppething one in three, with a glittering pinot grigio eye, saying things like, “But how did you know they were the one? How can you tell that you’re never going to want something else? What if you never meet someone?”

As Claudius said in Hamlet: “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” Weddings, to me, feel heavy with expectation, pregnant with emotion, saturated with hope, fear and hard-to-keep promises. I am too aware of the divorced parents standing in a room together for the first time in 15 years; too aware of the heartbroken ex-boyfriends sitting at home staring wet-eyed at their invitation; too aware of the drunk uncle talking loudly about immigration; too aware of the fragility and fickleness of the human heart. I feel the pressure, expectation and attention towards the couple like a wet coat, like a headache, like a falling crystal glass.

But most of all, I fear I’ll never have one because no one will ever ask me.

• This article was amended on 22 August. Due to an editing error, the quote, “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage”, was misattributed to Hamlet. It was actually Claudius speaking in Hamlet.